ABSTRACT
Liz Diamond is the Resident Director at Yale Rep and the Chair of Directing at the Yale School of Drama where she has taught and directed for 20 years. She has enjoyed a longstanding friendship and artistic collaboration with Suzan-Lori Parks begun in 1988 with her award-winning production of Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. Diamond has also collaborated with Parks on four other of her works, including The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Betting on the Dust Commander, The America Play, and substantial portions of 365 at Yale and in New York. I interviewed Diamond on 29 January 2013 by telephone with several subsequent conversations in February and March. Philip C. Kolin
When did you first meet Suzan-Lori?
Liz DiamondI met her in the spring of 1988. I was four years out of graduate school, running around downtown New York trying to make my way as a theater director. A good friend, the writer, Mac Wellman, had encouraged me to do some work at BACA Downtown, an exciting new art gallery and performance space in downtown Brooklyn.
PCKSince BACA is so crucial to understanding Suzan-Lori Parks, could you describe it?
LDIt was an old 2-storey parochial school, with high ceilings, a steep staircase, and wainscoting. Very plain and practical architecture. The performance space was on the second floor, and was about sixteen feet to the ceiling and maybe 40 feet square. Over to one side there was a kitchen area that served as a backstage.
PCKWould you sketch the history of BACA Downtown?
LDBACA Downtown was created by the Brooklyn Arts and Culture Association, a citizens’ arts association founded in 1966 to promote the arts in Brooklyn. In the late ’80s, wanting to draw to Brooklyn’s downtown area younger, experimental theatre and visual artists, musicians and multi-disciplinary artists, BACA found an abandoned school there to convert to a performance and gallery space. They picked the perfect person, Greta Gunderson, a visual artist living nearby, to launch the place. She brought in a brilliant young man, Kyle Chepulis, to help her and together they cleaned the place out, made two beautiful galleries on the ground floor, put in a light grid and sound gear upstairs, and opened the doors. Artists started submitting work and projects and very quickly word got out that Greta had the taste and the drive to create an arts scene. She would pretty much let you do anything as long as you cleaned up after yourself. For my first show with Suzan-Lori, our designer, an installation artist named Alan Glovsky, replaced the stairway railing with a hot water pipe that was entirely too hot to hold. I can’t remember why! There was nothing that Greta would say no to if she thought it was imaginative, original, provocative, and fun. Greta helped launch many young artists, including Anne Bogart, Jeff Jones, Ruth Margraff, and Mac Wellman, as well as Suzan-Lori and me.
So I was working at BACA Downtown, when Mac Wellman, who had been leading a writers’ group there, asked me to read Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, which he and Greta wanted to premiere in BACA’s first annual Fringe Festival. Suzan-Lori was a member of the writers’ group and Mac thought she was simply brilliant. Mac and Greta thought we would work well together. I don’t think they had any idea—well maybe they did—just how much Suzan-Lori and I would enjoy working with each other.
PCKWhat were your first impressions of Suzan-Lori Parks?
LDWe met for the first time on a rainy day at the Opera Café on Broadway, across from the Lincoln Center. I went in, looked around, and saw an athletic looking young woman with short little dreadlocks and a huge grin. She was laughing. We started talking and that was it. It was a playwright/director coup de foudre. Suzan-Lori amazed me. And moved me. Because she was crystal clear about her talent, about her work, and, pretty quickly, about wanting to work with me. I had read Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom prior to our meeting. I was dazzled by the language—its rhythm, its poetry. I didn’t feel I knew what I was reading yet, or quite how to read it yet, but having read it out loud to myself before meeting its author, I knew I held in my hands something completely new, and powerful. And then I met her and the feeling was confirmed. Here was a poet: a gifted, fiercely ambitious, theatrical poet.
PCKWhen you read it did you have any idea that Suzan-Lori was embarking on a spectacular career?
LD“Spectacular career” is not the phrase that came to me when I met Suzan-Lori. “Major artist” is what I thought. I thought she was brilliant. And I thought she would succeed in doing what she wanted to do, which was to create a body of powerful, lasting, important work. Reading Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom for the first time, I thought, “OK—I can’t quite crack the code yet but it’s full of powerful images, it’s incredibly funny, and it’s gorgeous to say out loud. It has astonishingly varied rhythms and textures, alliterative and onomatopoetic patterns, and virtuosic, politically-charged word play.” There were puns within puns. The stories in the play were funny, and heartbreaking, all at once.
PCKYes. Commenting on Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom in a BACA-sponsored publication New Writers Journal, Suzan-Lori claimed that the play came to her through voices that she had heard. Elsewhere she said that no one spoke like her characters did. Certainly in a language-driven play like Imperceptible Mutabilities we hear voices.
LDShe wasn’t kidding when she talked about hearing voices. In her early life as a writer she would say that she didn’t see her plays, she heard them. She still describes “transcribing” speeches, which she hears very clearly in her head. To this day she can recall the uncanny sensation of writing down Ham’s Begotten speech—in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World—on a paper napkin as it came to her whole, while she sat in a café in New Haven. Of course, for me, as a director, the fact that Suzan-Lori didn’t so much see, as hear her plays, was an irresistible invitation. Because I felt I could see them. The characters’ voices conjured immediate and powerful visual images to me. I saw the figures in her plays, what they wore, how they moved, and the environments they might move through: a nightmare hospital bed; an apartment infested with roaches that were actually surveillance cameras; the Great Hole of History; The Garden of HooDoo It—these were gifts for a director and designer. It was a gift to have the artistic freedom to figure out how to embody this visually rich, multi-dimensional poetry.
PCKWould you argue that what Suzan-Lori did for the late 1980s and early 1990s was comparable to what Adrienne Kennedy did in the 1960s, that is, to transform the landscape of American theatre through language?
LDSuzan-Lori’s plays, like Adrienne Kennedy’s, are on every serious syllabus of modern and contemporary American drama. But in addition to her plays, Suzan-Lori has written screenplays, novels, essays on the writer’s craft and on the theatre. She has had serious artistic and commercial success, winning the Pulitzer for Topdog/Underdog, and helping make The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess a Tony-winning Broadway hit. (She revised the libretto.) She continues to write important new plays, like The Book of Grace. Suzan-Lori is a very private person, but she gets out there and engages with the public. For 365 Plays/365 Days she travelled all over the country, meeting participants and audiences. She is right now doing another of her “Watch Me Work” series at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater, where she invites the public to join her for a couple of hours weekly to write and talk about their work together. All this artistic output and activity has had a major impact on the next generation. Greater than Kennedy’s? More direct, to be sure. I hear Suzan-Lori’s subversive wordplay, jazzy rhythms, stylization, long riffs, and dramatic confrontations in the plays of such exciting younger American writers as Marcus Gardley and Tarell McCraney, just to cite two. I also see Suzan-Lori’s way of being a playwright—her hands-on engagement with the hurly burly of theatre making—as having a strong influence on these and other younger writers. Young playwrights feel they need to be savvy about the marketplace, and break new artistic ground, all at once. Parks has done that, is doing that. And they admire this.
PCKWhat was it like collaborating with Suzan-Lori on reading a script for production?
LDBefore we got down to work on Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, we just hung out, drinking cups of coffee and sharing our biographies with each other. We joked about our families, and being raised Catholic. She told me all kinds of hair-raising stories about growing up in an African American military family and living in Germany. I told her my crazy stories about growing up in a small house with 4 kids in a very white suburb of Boston. We shared stories about our years at the women’s colleges we went to. We shared a lot of very personal stuff.
PCKWhat happened next?
LDThen we just sat across the table from each other and read the play out loud. I had Suzan-Lori start and then I joined in. A director can learn a great deal, hearing a writer read his or her own work. It was instructive to hear and watch Suzan-Lori read the text. She read simply, carefully attending to her punctuation, and pronouncing her idiosyncratic spelling in a way that was not a dialect—but a poeticization, a heightening of everyday American dialects, black/white, urban/rural, educated/unlettered. This was a stylization that invited the listener to really listen to the way a word was bent and shaped by the speaker, and to appreciate the political significance, and the singular beauty—or ugliness—of these linguistic inventions and deformations. Gradually I would join in, and we would read the play out loud together going through it page by page. I would ask questions to glean everything I possibly could about given and present circumstances, intention and objective… seeking answers to questions about dramatic action inside the text of the play. I began to see that the information I needed was there, embedded in the language: Mona squeezing through the window guard to sit on the ledge and consider suicide; Aretha lying in a hospital bed, newly toothless, dreaming of her past lives; Sergeant Smith standing atop his dreamed-of desk, dreaming of earning his military “distinction.” The way this information seemed to shimmer in the text, “hidden in plain sight,” suggested that the staging needed to be similarly graceful, non-literal but also non-abstract. The task was to put these “concrete metaphors” onstage, so that the real-life truthfulness of the characters’ struggles would resonate, universalized through stage poetry.
PCKSuzan-Lori’s language deconstructs the idea of stereotypical African American speech, doesn’t it?
LDYes. With that first read-through, I understood what Suzan-Lori meant when she insisted, with real vehemence, that it wasn’t dialect. She had seen African American colloquial language and gesture represented in American theatre, film, and TV, and she felt its use there was a form of abuse that shut the listener’s ears to the specific human life of the character. The spectator could say—“I know that character”—when in fact they did not. Stereotype is a central aspect of racist thinking and a big part of Suzan-Lori’s artistic project could be said to expose the racism— conscious and unconscious—by deconstructing the use of stereotype in representation. Suzan-Lori knew that if actors weren’t disabused of the notion that her text’s idiosyncratic spellings signified a “realistic” regional, cultural, ethnic dialect, her entire poetic/political point would be lost. Obviously, Parks’ language partakes of colloquialisms, speech rhythms, and moving imagery, the rich landscape of everyday speech heard in African American and other American dialects, present and past. It celebrates their rich, densely meaningful variety and beauty. But her language also reveals the suffering, the betrayals, the hypocrisies, the dishonesties, the bombast, and the yearning inside these dialects and locutions. The slight distancing effect of her poeticized language allows the listener to hear the speaker’s unconscious assumptions, lies, needs, fears. Her language is a psychological x-ray that exposes the soul of the character, and a sociological x-ray that reveals the soul of the community. Understanding this was the first step toward my understanding Suzan-Lori’s work.
PCKHow did the two of you convey that important point to actors?
LDWe just told them, and reminded them, and reminded them, and reminded them. I gave them lots and lots of notes. Actors generally would initially see Suzan-Lori’s text as invitations to play stereotype. We’d see heads snap, hips cock, and faces set in ways that we’d seen black people represented for years onstage. Suzan-Lori would shake her head and say, “Oh God, here comes the stereotype.” The actors, understandably, did not realize at first that they were being invited to do something else, something richer and infinitely more artful and truthful.
PCKHow did you get the actors to understand what was required?
LDBy letting them in on the joke. By inviting them to do what Brecht was asking his actors to do (which is what great comic actors do automatically)—which is to be conscious as actors of that which the character may be unconscious of—which is the gap between what they think they are saying and what they are actually saying, between what they want to project and what they are actually projecting. Between what they are doing and what they think they are doing. When an actor becomes aware of this gap, or contradiction, they can subtly and artfully select when to expose that contradiction—by a shift in emphasis, a betraying gesture, and when to let the text do the work and sail on. Once the actors understood what the language was revealing about their character’s self image and understanding of their place in the world, they could play the roles with much greater objectivity. They could let the mask slip, “protest too much,” exposing, ever so delicately, the chasm yawning under their character’s most fervent assertions. This of course could have led to hideous “commenting,” when the text in fact required a fervent commitment to the stakes. But it didn’t. Suzan-Lori’s work requires delicacy, high intelligence, inventive physicality, compassion, and a subversive sense of humor. We were very, very lucky to work with actors who brought all of these gifts to the work.
PCKDid Suzan-Lori participate in rehearsals?
LDNot so much. But she would watch and respond and share her notes with me. They were good, specific, practical notes.
PCKHow did the script evolve for Imperceptible Mutabilities? Did it change much from the first draft that you had seen?
LDEarly on in working on Imperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom, I had a gut feeling that the second part, Flounder, didn’t belong in the play. That whole section seemed to come from an entirely different set of concerns. It seemed to want to be a stand-alone play. Suzan-Lori agreed, but felt very strongly that Imperceptible Mutabilities needed to be a four-part play. Realizing that for Suzan-Lori, the play was an episodic composition, comprised of a set of discrete panels, as in a medieval altarpiece, helped me think about what it was that made this “panel” wrong.” This one panel just didn’t contribute to the whole telling of this tragicomic tale of “nonevolution.” Suzan-Lori was never shy about protesting an idea that did not feel right, but this one did, so she pulled that section out. Now she felt we had a new problem: a panel was missing. I felt, meanwhile, that we didn’t so much need a new panel as a way to get from one panel to the next. What “moved” these figures, who changed character name and situation but remained somehow the same (Chona/Charlene to Anglor Saxon to Buffy Smith…)? And so I asked if Suzan-Lori could create a kind of passage between panels. What could she write that would help the audience link the stories within each panel to one another, thematically, poetically, if not literally? I felt the underlying theme of these panels—of the crushing weight of racism on our history, the human disappointments, betrayals, and abuses it causes, and its power to mutate victim and perpetrator in ways we may not perceive, but nevertheless betray in our speech—needed to be thrust up, so to speak, for the audience to grasp. The progress of the figures in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom is actually backwards. From snails to slugs…
PCKSo regarding the removal of the second part of Imperceptible Mutabilities, what happened next?
LDWe dove into the question: what made the whole greater than the sum of its parts? One day we were talking and I just asked: “What’s the Third Kingdom? We are in the Third Kingdom, and the mutabilities, the imperceptible mutabilities are taking place in the Third Kingdom. Where is that?” It seemed to be the medium, the space within which this whole event takes place, but I couldn’t see it or hear it yet.
PCKWhat was Suzan-Lori’s response?
LDShe said, “It’s the ocean. It’s the Atlantic, it’s between. It’s the space between.” My eyes just popped and I said, “You’ve got to write that.” She was on her way to the MacDowell Colony. I urged her to try and write, even at risk of seeming too obvious, something called Third Kingdom, some kind of poem to get us from one part to another. She wasn’t sure if it would qualify as the fourth panel, which she wanted for the play. But she said she would try. I will never forget the day she called me and said, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it. Just a minute. Wait, I am going to fax some pages.” And out from the fax machine poured this unbelievably beautiful choral poem, Third Kingdom. And that was it—the 4th panel, the container of the whole play, and, since she wrote Third Kingdom in two sections, the passages that I needed to move us from panel to panel.
PCKIt’s beautiful writing and has an evocative effect.
LDWithin the rest of the play, I can’t recall any significant rewrites, save some small cuts or line re-assignments. She did some cutting and clarifying in Snails. We struggled with that part, to glean who is doing what to whom and who is in the room when and so forth.
PCKWhat was the audience reaction to the early plays you directed: Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Betting on the Dust Commander, and The America Play?
LDWith Imperceptible Mutabilities the reaction was amazing. BACA Downtown sold out. The word of mouth was incredible. We had waitlists and long lines out the door to get into the few performances we had. Mac and Greta invited us to do it again in 1989 and again the response was huge. Erika Munk wrote a beautiful review in the Village Voice; Yale’s Theater published Alisa Solomon’s exquisite essay; and then the OBIE Committee gave us OBIES for Best New Play, Best Direction, and for Best Performance (to Pamela Tyson). Then this tiny show was chosen as one of the NY Times’ top ten shows of 1989.
PCKIt was almost like Funnyhouse of a Negro, Adrienne Kennedy’s ground breaking play in 1964.
LDThat’s an apt comparison. Betting on the Dust Commander enjoyed a similarly positive response. In both cases, audiences tended to be young, and ready for the new. The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, which we did at Yale Rep, seems to me, looking back, to have been the production that brought Suzan-Lori to national attention, into what she slyly referred to as “the Big House.” [The slave-owner’s house.] There the response was complicated. We would receive standing ovations and have people walking out of the same performance. We had a brilliant cast, a superb design team, and the resources of a powerful regional theatre. And a very mainstream, mostly middle-aged, white audience. For many in the house, Suzan-Lori’s play was a revelation. One guy wrote to me about how the experience of seeing her play felt as he imagined seeing The Rite of Spring must have felt in 1913. He, and many, felt thrilled to be discovering this voice, this vision. Others were alienated, upset, threatened. That show was written about in the Times, Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic. Critics loved writing about it and wrote eloquently about it; the play and production seemed to give them something they felt was genuinely important to write about. The America Play, which we also did at Yale Rep and then at the Public Theater, was again, a critical success, and again won Obie Awards for Best New Play and for two of our brilliant actors, Gail Grate and Michael Potts. Again we experienced angry walkouts and passionate applause at nearly every performance. The walkouts were not easy to take, believe me. We soul searched—were we failing these people in some way? We were not smug about this. But ultimately, we both believed that what we had created onstage was important—and that the kinds of disturbances the work was creating in the hearts of some of our audience needed to happen.
PCKYou mention altarpieces. I am intrigued by the ways in which Suzan-Lori uses religious rituals. Certainly the Cain and Abel story unfolds in Topdog/Underdog and in Black Man we have the bells associated with the Catholic Mass. And during In the Blood, it seems to me, Hester LaNegrita’s accusers sound like Job’s accusers. Why do you think Suzan-Lori has incorporated so many rituals and rites into the fabrics of her plays?
LDBecause these are part of the fabric of her life. They are part of the cultural capital she draws on. They come from her Catholic upbringing and from her cosmopolitan education. Her family’s expatriate life and travels, and her education exposed her to the history and works of Western art and culture. It’s part of who she is. And of course, growing up Catholic is going to feed the theatrical instinct! Every Sunday, witnessing all that holy water, gold, brocade, stylized gesture, ponderous speech, song put in service to the magic act of the transubstantiation—surely got into the ground water of Suzan-Lori’s being. But Greek tragedy, and Shakespeare—they got in there, too. So did jazz, the blues, the Harlem Renaissance, Faulkner…
PCKI like thinking of Third Kingdom, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, and The America Play forming a trilogy on black identity and black history. Even though the plays are different, each one of them in its own way does get us into the great (w)hole of history. Would you agree?
LDI think you could see these plays as a trio of meditations on what it meant/ means to be black in the America of our time. An artist’s singularly honest attempt to understand and own that history, by writing it down.
I believe the power of this work will endure and grow. These plays are built on ancient dramatic structures. Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, as I remarked earlier, echoes the narrative action of a medieval altarpiece, and of a passion play, illustrating, in episodes, not the life of one man—but of a people. The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World operates like a Requiem Mass. It performs the ritual and communal act of remembering the Black Man’s history, of resurrecting it and re-enacting it so that He can finally be laid to rest. The America Play might be seen as the ultimate family reunion play (like Oedipus Rex) or tragic recognition play—the great drama of the reunion of the holy (the pun is irresistible) Father with the Son and Mother. These deep structures are part of what make the plays so resonant. But it’s important as well to remember that these great big plays by Parks are not solemn, even when they are heartbreaking. They are loaded with comedy, slapstick, farce.
PCKHow did each of Parks’s plays challenge you as a director?
LDWith each of these plays the main directorial breakthrough, apart from understanding the purpose of the stylization of the language, was about discovering the container of the whole action.
In Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, the location that contained the whole was the Third Kingdom or Middle Passage—that watery realm between Africa and America plied by the slave ships.
With Black Man it was discovering, again, what space would contain the whole. Where is this strange empty space where Black Woman comes to claim the body of her dead husband, and which becomes animate with the restless spirits of the ancestors? The ground zero of this play is not the front porch of Black Man and Black Woman. The “panels” in this play are, in effect, plays within the play. The main action needs to take place in a place that will contain the largest action of the play—which is the Chorus’ struggle to get the Black Woman to own her husband’s history. Before she can claim her husband’s body, they must get her to hear, and accept, HIS story. This Chorus, made up of recent and long dead spirits, are themselves caught, trapped in this ice-cold limbo. Like the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, they cannot rest as long as their stories are forgotten or suppressed. They cannot “cross the river”; the Black Man cannot finally be buried, until their story is known. The scenographic breakthrough for me was to see the action in a space suggestive of a vast, empty morgue, which, in its austere grandeur, could evoke the ice-cold, historic “cold storage”—the limbo where Black Woman has come to claim her husband’s body. The second breakthrough was to discover, with set designer Riccardo Hernandez, how to transform this cold, cruel space into a kind of cathedral in green nature—the restored roun’ worl’—where the Black (unremembered, forgotten) Man, and his Ancestors, could finally be acknowledged, honored, and laid to rest.
The big discovery of The America Play was that the whole thing took place in a hole. Which we discovered one day after a reading of the play at New Dramatists, when Suzan-Lori worried aloud about where the hole should be onstage in relation to the Foundling Father, and I jokingly bent my head way back and looked up, as if into a great opening high up—and Suzan-Lori said, “But that’s it!” And then I realized—my god that IS it! And of course we both fell out laughing, because the idea had been there all along, we just hadn’t seen it yet.
PCKYou and Suzan-Lori have often said you share the same sense of humor. How is that reflected in the plays? Besides the puns such as Foundling Father, would you let us in on some of the jokes? In Last Black Man there are some hilarious lines and even in In the Blood, despite its links to Greek tragedy, there are moments that reverberate with humor.
LDWell… there are the names, first of all, which are never accidental: Brazil in The America Play recalls Brazil nuts, which, in racist parlance, were once called “nigger toes.” The broken family at the end of Imperceptible Mutabilities goes by the iconic WASP family name of Smith. These are jokes, excruciating jokes. In Black Man you have the stunning Ham’s Begotten Speech which is as sustained a piece of subversive wordplay as any you’ll find in Shakespeare. “Yo be wentin’ much too long without hisself a comb in from thuh frizzly that resulted sprung forth…” and so on.
In our productions, Suzan-Lori’s wordplay, or punning, and time warps, were echoed in the playing, in the props, in the clothes… In Black Man we put Queen-Then-Pharaoh-Hatshepsut in a gold lamé gown that Diana Ross or Cleopatra might have worn—she was the Mother of All Divas! Bigger and Bigger Thomas we conceived as the son or grandson of Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas—Black Panther beret, shades, with hip hop accents. And again, all in gold—a holy spirit after all. The marble slab on which Black man’s corpse lay became an altar, a bier, a desk. In Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, Mrs Smith and her daughters wore perfect brown and white polka-dotted Swiss dresses straight out of the 1950s, and little white gloves. They moved their gloved hands in ways that recalled the graceful gestures of the idealized 50s TV female—but the shadow of minstrelsy was also there, in the white gloves, and the patterned gestures. In The America Play we covered the stage floor in glittery black sand, and what Brazil unearthed in his “digging” for his father were little black boxes, perfect replicas of the big black coffin Brazil and Lucy had dragged along with them. Eventually the stage was dotted with tiny black coffins, with red velvet interiors, containing the curious remains of the Foundling Father’s lost Hall of Wonders. When the Foundling Father appeared in a vision to Lucy, performing a fragment from Our American Cousin, the play Lincoln watched the night he was shot, he introduced the act with a little riff from James Brown. Some of these ideas began as jokes that we thought up to crack one another up. They’d stay in if they kept doing so. Some of the ideas came to us as ways to make a painful moment hurt even more. The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Liz Diamond, Yale Repertory Theatre, 1994. Michael Potts (Brazil) and Reg Montgomery (The Foundling Father). Photo by T. Charles Erikson. Courtesy of the photographer.https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203103845/185f9083-7d03-4391-87f6-02968185eb89/content/fig_9_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
PCKAre there any plans to stage revivals of these early plays?
LDNot yet, not in the “Big Houses,” but that will change.
PCKSeveral years ago there was a revival of Funnyhouse of a Negro and people came from all over the world to see it simply because the play hadn’t been done often. Certainly with the great success of a play like Topdog, I do foresee revivals on the horizon but it’s these early plays that also need the exposure and need the benefits of revisiting them.
LDIt’s a little like O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and his other gorgeous early plays. It took the Wooster Group to dig up—to dig—that great play. Let’s not wait that long to dig these great plays.
PCKWell let me say how grateful I am for all your work. Your responses today tie in so beautifully with the theme of this collection, Suzan-Lori Parks in Person.
